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Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush

Following in the footsteps of her famous father, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush became an expert on labor legislation in the United States and one of its strongest defenders.

Cecilia Razovsky

Cecilia Razovsky was a remarkably active woman who spent her life striving to assist immigrants in adapting to life in the United States and other countries. Razovsky found countless ways to help Jewish refugees in particular, from writing plays and pamphlets to running committees and organizations for immigrant aid.

Tamar De Sola Pool

Born into a family deeply involved in Jewish activism and scholarship, Tamar De Sola Pool spent over a decade as both a Hadassah chapter president and later Hadassah’s national president. She wrote two books in collaboration with her husband, volunteered at displaced persons camps in Cyprus, and helped resettle Jewish children in Palestine with Hadassah.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Letty Cottin Pogrebin--a writer, activist, editor, organizer, and advocate--gained national recognition first in the national women’s movement and later as a spokesperson for Jewish feminism and issues related to Israel-Palestine. In her work, Pogrebin writes intimately about her own life’s complexities, while echoing the experiences of millions of women.

Molly Picon

A lively comic actress, Molly Picon brought Yiddish theater to a wider American audience. She acted in the first Yiddish play ever performed on Broadway and insisted on performing in Yiddish on a 1932 tour of Palestine. Filming on location in Poland, on the eve of World War II, Picon captured a view of shtetl life soon to be erased by the Holocaust.

Bertha Pappenheim

Bertha Pappenheim was the founder of the Jewish feminist movement in Germany. In 1904, she founded the League of Jewish Women. Pappenheim believed that male-led Jewish social service societies underestimated the value of women’s work and insisted on a woman’s movement that was equal to and entirely independent of men’s organizations.

Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick is a Jewish-American writer, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Her creative, authentic, and intelligent stories, including “The Shawl” (1989) and “The Puttermesser Papers” (1997), have made her one of the greatest fiction writers and literary critics alive.

Adele Gutman Nathan

Adele Gutman Nathan was a prolific writer, theater director, and creator of historical pageants and commemorative events. She wrote fourteen children’s books, in addition to newspaper and magazines articles. Nathan directed theater in Baltimore and New York and staged events from the 1933 and 1939 World’s Fairs to the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Barbara Myerhoff

An award-winning anthropologist and feminist scholar, Barbara Myerhoff emphasized the importance of storytelling and studying one’s own community. Myerhoff’s work pioneered the study of elderly Jews and highlighted the role of women in religion, which had been previously neglected by the scholarly world.

Bess Myerson

When Bess Myerson encountered anti-Semitism as the first Jewish Miss America, she used her new-found fame to fight hatred through the Anti-Defamation League. Myerson stayed close to the Jewish tradition and people throughout her career, always presenting herself as a Jewish public figure.

Alice Davis Menken

Alice Davis Menken was an influential social reformer whose many published works had a notable impact on the field of penology. She became interested in delinquency among young female Jewish immigrants while working at a settlement house on the Lower East Side. Menken proceeded to pioneer the argument that therapy, not punishment, is the most effective treatment for young delinquents.

Paula E. Hyman

Distinguished historian Paula Hyman was engaged deeply in Jewish feminism and wrote extensively on the history of Jewish women in an effort to integrate their experience into the Jewish historical narrative. A role model for many, she challenged sacrosanct beliefs and stereotypes with vigor and knowledge and left behind a myriad of scholarly contributions and a profound vision for Jewish women.

Frances Horwich

Frances Horwich was loved by parents and children alike for her educational television show, Ding Dong School, which taught millions of children how to finger paint, grow plants, and do craft projects with household objects such as pipe cleaners and paper plates. She ended up writing 27 Ding Dong School books and two books for parents, as well as winning several awards over her career.

Elizabeth Holtzman

Elizabeth Holtzman pursued a public career epitomizing some of the most important trends in postwar American and Jewish life. In her successive roles as a congresswoman, Brooklyn district attorney, comptroller of New York City, and political commentator, she emerged as an effective and activist public servant, a forceful campaigner, and a champion of liberal and feminist causes.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Gertrude Himmefarb (1922-2019) was an American historian and public intellectual who published more than fifteen books mostly dedicated to nineteenth-century British intellectual life. She made significant contributions to the intellectual foundation of the neoconservative movement, arguing that social policy should follow the Victorian example of deep moralism.

New Online Encyclopedia of Jewish Women! It's Here!

Jordan Namerow

Happy Women's History Month!

Earlier this week, the Jewish Women's Archive proudly launched the online version of Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Paula Hyman of Yale University and Dalia Ofer of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and originally published by Alice and Moshe Shalvi of Shalvi Publishing, Ltd.

Leni Yahil

Leni Yahil was a German-born Israeli scholar and pioneer of Holocaust research in the decades following the Second World War. Working closely with Yad Vashem, she was among the first to emphasize Jewish primary sources, explore the importance of Jewish resistance, and document the Jewish experience in Northern Europe during the Holocaust.

Writers in Victorian England

Spurred to publish initially as a response to the concerted campaigning of Christian conversionists, women writers were the first Anglo-Jews to produce literature on Jewish themes in England. By the end of the nineteenth century, literature by Jewish women had expanded to encompass not only works defensive of the dignity and rights of Anglo-Jewry, but also satirical novels critical of the community’s materialism and marriage practices.

Nelly Wolffheim

Nelly Wolffheim spent her career developing and teaching a kindergarten curriculum based around Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic framework. She taught this curriculum, which encouraged children to express their sexual desires, to Jewish women teachers in Berlin. After escaping Germany for England in 1939, Wolffheim struggled to continue her research but began publishing her work again after the war.

Theresa Wolfson

Theresa Wolfson, economist and educator, taught at Brooklyn College from 1929 until her retirement in 1967. A prolific writer, she published in the fields of labor economics and industrial relations. As early as 1916, Wolfson studied barriers to the advancement of women in the workplace and the unequal treatment of women within trade unions.

Charlotte Wolff

A pioneering German-Jewish lesbian and feminist physician, Charlotte Wolff became interested in sexology, psychotherapy, and chirology while working as a physician in Berlin’s working-class neighborhoods. Soon after the Nazis came to power she fled to France and then to England, where she began researching and writing books on chirology. In the 1960s she turned her research to homosexuality and published a landmark study on lesbianism.

Ruth R. Wisse

As a scholar and a literary and social critic, Ruth R. Wisse is a unique figure in American Jewish letters. She bridges the worlds of Yiddish and American culture, of literature and politics, and of Israel and the diaspora. In 2000, she won the National Jewish Book Award for The Modern Jewish Canon.

Rachel Wischnitzer

Rachel Wischnitzer was a pioneer in the fields of Jewish art history and synagogue architecture. Her wide-ranging scholarship included books, articles, book reviews, and exhibition catalogs on ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish art. The breadth of her contributions to the history of Jewish art and architecture is exemplified in her lifelong dedication to her work.

Barbara Mayer Wertheimer

Barbara Mayer Wertheimer gave a voice to the voiceless, empowering thousands of women union workers through her initiatives in the late 20th century. Wertheimer established the trade union women’s studies program in 1972 and developed several other academic programs, giving working women access to education and the ability to interact and organize with other union workers.

Mildred Wertheimer

Mildred Wertheimer was a scholar of international relations and political science in the early twentieth century. In the 1920s, few women worked in the field of foreign policy, and even fewer achieved her level of scholarship and renown. 

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